Flash, Dash And Now, Art

By RANDY KENNEDY

Published: June 17, 2005

CORRECTION APPENDED

For the people who descend on it every summer, Coney Island is still a land that floats just offshore from reality. But like any place where escapism is bought and sold, there has always been a very real economic mooring: nobody gets something for nothing.

So in the summer of 2003, when the artist Steve Powers became simultaneously obsessed with Coney Island and the dying art of sign painting, he had a tough time convincing many of the wary and con-wise business owners that he wanted to give them -- free, really -- brand-new hand-painted signs for their aging bumper-car palaces and clam bars.

''They just weren't having it,'' he recalled. ''They were like, 'You're going to give it to me? O.K. ... Then what do I have to give you?'''

But Mr. Powers, a former graffiti artist who has had scrapes with the law and lots of experience dealing with suspicious authority, was persistent. And now his personal mission has become a sprawling public art project that blurs the line between art and commerce in a way that perhaps could happen only on Coney Island. Since last summer, when the project began in earnest, Mr. Powers and Creative Time, the nonprofit arts group, have signed up dozens of artists with gallery credentials and international followings to paint signs for businesses and arcades.

Mr. Powers painted the cars on the Cyclone, the famous roller coaster, which he said he considered a high point of his artistic career. Nicole Eisenman, who joined the project last year, made a slightly menacing cartoon sign for a game called Skin the Wire, in which a contestant tries to move a hoop along a revolving wire spiral without letting the hoop touch the wire. Rita Ackermann painted a 50-foot-long carnival mural on Jones Walk, an arcade lane that had become an eyesore in recent years but is experiencing a rebirth largely because of the new signs.

Most of the signs painted last year remain, like the popular one known as ''Hey Joey!'' at the clam bar on the Boardwalk at West 12th Street, created by a Los Angeles duo who call themselves the Gents of Desire.

This year more artists have created signs and murals, including a sweeping, surreal mural near the Stillwell Avenue subway stop made by identical-twin graffiti artists from Brazil who call themselves Os Gemeos (the Twins). In addition to the signs made for businesses, Mr. Powers and a group of artists and professional sign painters will also open a rented storefront tomorrow at 1206 Surf Avenue, called the Dreamland Artist Clubhouse, in which customers can buy ready-made signs or commission artists to make personalized ones. And some lucky contestants at arcade games will be able to win artworks instead of anemic goldfish in plastic bags.

Sign painting flourished on Coney Island for decades during the amusement kingdom's heyday and often attracted struggling artists trying to make a living with a brush. Probably the most famous example is George Herriman, the creator of the legendary comic strip ''Krazy Kat,'' who painted signs and also worked as a barker for a snake act.

Walking today through the carnival maze and fried-sausage smoke between the Boardwalk and Surf Avenue, it is not always easy to tell which signs were painted by the artists and which are true Coney Island relics, and Mr. Powers said he felt that was one of the strengths of the project.

''What separates this from most public art projects is that it is commerce first,'' he said, explaining how he and other artists had to enter into sometimes hard-nosed negotiations with grizzled arcade owners who wanted nothing to do with any post-modern artistic winks and nods. They simply wanted their game's name in brighter colors than the sign on the guy's game next door. Many artists, in turn, would push for something a little weirder or more conceptual. Sometimes they prevailed, but sometimes they didn't, and the result was a highly traditional sign.

''In the end it's good,'' Mr. Powers said recently, at work on a new sign in his studio in Lower Manhattan. He smiled and wiped the sweat from his forehead. ''They're too free, these artists. They need a little structure, damn it.''

Interviewed one recent sweltering afternoon, some business owners agreed and were not delicate about their views.

''You don't have a clue what that says, do you? -- Come on, be honest,'' asked Bernard Furmansky, who owns a bustling food stand at one end of Jones Walk, pointing to a decidedly nontraditional artist-made sign for a cigar stand nearby. Then he pointed up to the eye-catching signs ringing his own business, which were painted a few weeks earlier by Ronnie Cutrone, a well-known artist and onetime assistant to Andy Warhol.

''What's that -- a butterfly or a shrimp?'' he said, gesturing toward one of the slightly abstracted paintings. (It appeared to be, in fact, a seahorse, which was accompanied elsewhere on the sign by a fish with legs and a monkey holding a hot dog.)

But then Mr. Furmansky smiled and threw an arm around Alexa Coyne, a curator from Creative Time who has become a fixture around the Boardwalk over the last few months. ''It's better than what was there,'' Mr. Furmansky said, and then corrected himself, remembering that he had not had much of a sign up before. ''I guess I should say it's better than what was not there.''

Ms. Coyne, who recently moved to New York from Dublin, said that Coney Island and its faded grandeur had offered her a kind of crash course in the stranger aspects of American culture.

''I've seen people on Surf Avenue with briefcases full of live snakes,'' she said. ''You wouldn't believe the things I've seen down here.''

Over the last several months, she and the crop of new artists have learned how to navigate the alliances, partnerships, ancient feuds and invisible territorial boundaries that make up Coney Island, where many business owners have long existed in a state of perpetual near-legitimacy. As she gave a reporter a tour recently, she explained which business owners would probably agree to be interviewed, which would not and which were better not approached at all.

One veteran arcade owner, who spoke only on the condition that his name not be used, said that he was suspicious of the project at first, but had watched as the signs had brought customers back to Jones Walk.

''This place used to not be lighted,'' he said. ''It was shabby. It was a place you weren't sure you wanted to come to.'' But now, he said: ''We're getting city people who never came here before, and they're bringing their cameras, and I guess they're trying to find subliminal things somewhere in these signs.''

Joey Pesca, the manager of the popular clam bar, also known as the Gyro Corner, at the Boardwalk and West 12th Street, said the wall sign painted for him by the Gents of Desire -- otherwise known as Jonathan Bleser and Alexis Ross -- has made his business a destination for art lovers and has given him a new appreciation for artists.

''They were actually a joy to be around,'' Mr. Pesca, also known as Joey Clams, said of the Gents. ''And at the end they added this little thing that says, 'Hey Joey!,' which has made me a little famous around here.''

Mr. Powers said he hoped to keep the project alive in coming summers, especially as development plans loom that could scrub away much of the trademark Coney Island patina and bring more of what he described as an art abomination: factory-made vinyl and plastic signs.

The only problem now, he said, was that business owners have completely overcome their former reluctance and have been clamoring for signs in such numbers that the project cannot keep up with the demands.

''At first no one wants one,'' Mr. Powers said. ''And now, they're like: 'Oh great! Now you're here to paint my sign. Where were you yesterday, when I really needed it?' ''

Photos: Gents of Desire's mural for Joey's clam bar on Coney Island's Boardwalk. (Photo by Ting-Li Wang/The New York Times)(pg. E33); The artist who calls herself Swoon created this sign for an arcade game on the Bowery on Coney Island. (Photo by Charlie Samuels/Creative Time); From left, signs by Isca Greenfield-Sanders (the clown) and Christa Donner (''Happy Landings''), and two by the duo known as Morning Breath. (Photographs by Ting-Li Wang/The New York Times)(pg. E39)

Correction: June 18, 2005, Saturday
A picture caption in Weekend yesterday with an article about new hand-painted signs at Coney Island reversed the identities of artists who painted two of them. Christa Donner made ''Feed the Clown!'' and Isca Greenfield-Sanders made ''Happy Landings.''